Chapter 29

The sight of someone you thought was dead is a chilling prospect. Seeing Tom, who I thought was dead for good, stared at me impassively from across the crowd, seemingly unconcerned about everything that was happening around him.

“So, David...”, another girl began to ask when I hastened to move across the room to reach Tom, eager to get him away from this crowd. While my behaviour would certainly be considered rude, I found myself not caring about it at all. I had eyes for only one person, a person I was eager to send back to the realms of death.

When I reached the place where Tom was supposed to be, I found myself looking at nothing but air. Looking around, I saw him exiting the party. It was clear that he wanted me to follow him and I had no qualms doing so. I quickly retraced his steps towards the exit, eager to confront him and finish him, once and for all.

I had barely made it out of Luke’s property when I felt myself being grabbed and thrown over someone’s shoulder, crashing into a wall. My entire body racked in pain, as I looked in the direction from where I had been attacked.

Looking at Tom made the resentment I felt towards him bubble back to the surface of my core. Last time I had faced him, I had been too concerned with Frost and his actions to dwell on my personal feelings towards Tom. Plus, any opportunity I had of exacting revenge had been robbed by Samuel, who, frankly, deserved it more.

I was surprised to find that I didn’t feel any fear towards my opponent this time around. After all, this was a guy who had gotten the better of me twice already and I had only escaped relatively unscathed because of terrific strokes of luck and the fact that I and Samuel outnumbered him.

Throughout all of this, one question continued to bother me. How the hell was he still alive when the Council had confirmed him dead? There were only two possible answers to that question. Either, the Council had lied about his demise, which was highly unlikely. No matter how tenuous my relationship with the Council was, I didn’t think they would stoop to such lows.

That only left the other, far more terrifying option. Necromancy. Sol Syntrivon. Somehow, the necromancer had found a way to resurrect a dead person on Earth when he was supposed to be in outer space.

I was distracted briefly by my thought process of the prospect of Syntrivon affecting things from outer space when Tom rudely reminded me to pay my undivided attention towards him. He ran towards me with lightning coated fists and only my quick reaction prevented me from being skewered.

The electricity seemed to be zapping around him incessantly. The electricity was different from the last time I saw as it had a reddish hue to it, serving to make Tom look especially menacing.

Before I could ponder further on the change in his lightning, Tom was on the offensive once more. I quickly summoned my own scythe and proceeded to swing towards him in a clean arc, not really expecting to make contact. My intention was to slow down the fight because Tom had the upper hand, having taken the early initiative in this face-off. I quickly used my own ability to slow down time, hoping to take hold of the flow of this fight.

Contrary to all my expectations though, Tom didn’t have any intention of dodging my scythe at all. He didn’t hesitate even for a moment and my scythe struck him in the shoulder, lodging in his bone. Instead of crying out in pain or even flinching back, Tom didn’t show even a trace of any outward reaction that he had his shoulder almost separated from his body.

I let go of the scythe and jumped back as far I could, narrowly missing another lightning punch from Tom. My scythe was still lodged in his shoulder and it made for a gruesome sight. There wasn’t any trace of pain on his face nor did it seem to impede his movement. He continued walking forward towards me, all the while trying to extract my scythe from his shoulder.

The scythe separated from his shoulder with a squelch before he proceeded to throw it at me, suggesting that he didn’t consider me a threat, with or without the scythe. I was too fascinated and disgusted at the sight of shoulders almost stitching together to perceive any slight towards me. Within seconds, his shoulders looked as good as new and I truly understood that I was faced with a daunting task ahead of me.